J. R. R. Tolkien Reads from The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings & Different Works

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist

If you’d like­ed to listen to the voice of your favourite author within the 9­teen-six­ties — a time earlier than audio­books, not to mention pod­casts — you con­sult­ed the cat­a­log of Caed­mon Data. That label spe­cial­ized in LPs of lit­er­ary emi­nences learn­ing their very own work. This will or is probably not the type of com­pa­ny during which you’d anticipate finding a author of excessive fan­ta­sy like J. R. R. Tolkien. However in 1967, simply as The Lord of the Rings was get pleasure from­ing a burst of coun­ter­cul­ture-dri­ven pop­u­lar­i­ty, the label put out the album Poems and Songs of Mid­dle-Earth, which you’ll be able to sam­ple above.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist

Tolkien’s voice had been placed on a com­mer­cial file simply as soon as earlier than, in 1930, years earlier than he’d pub­lished even The Hob­bit. That was for a sequence of Eng­lish classes by Arthur Lloyd James, the ill-fat­ed pho­neti­cian who pio­neered stan­dards of professional­nun­ci­a­tion in broad­solid­ing. Tolkien had already estab­lished him­self at Oxford as a philol­o­gist, which can have had some­factor to do along with his selec­tion to par­tic­i­pate in such a challenge.

Not that Tolkien him­self sound­ed fairly just like the ide­al BBC announc­er, however then, the huge learn­er­ship he would lat­er accrue along with his nov­els would­n’t have need­ed him to — and certainly, they’d thrill par­tic­u­lar­ly to the file­ings he would make not in Eng­lish in any respect, however in Quenya and Sin­darin, two Elvish lan­guages of his personal inven­tion. The album’s sec­ond facet is tak­en up by The Street Goes Ever On, a tune cycle adapt­ed from Tolkien’s poems of Mid­dle-Earth by professional­lif­ic com­pos­er and per­former Don­ald Swann.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist

Lat­er, within the sev­en­ties, the now defunct label would assem­ble the mate­r­i­al for 2 extra releas­es fea­tur­ing the creator’s voice and the creator’s voice alone, one with selec­tions from The Hob­bit and The Fel­low­ship of the Ring and anoth­er with selec­tions from The Two Tow­ers and The Return of The King. By that point, there was a big and recep­tive mar­ket for such prod­uct. “I pre­sume that almost all peo­ple who purchase this file will have already got learn Professional­fes­sor Tolkien’s tetral­o­gy,” say the lin­er notes for Poems and Songs of Mid­dle-Earth, describ­ing that tetral­o­gy as “a piece that may both whole­ly enthrall you or go away you stone chilly, and, whichev­er your response, noth­ing and no one will ever change it.” The author provides that, “as a mem­ber of the enchant­ed par­ty, I’ve discovered by expe­ri­ence that it’s fairly use­much less to argue with the uncon­vert­ed.” His title: W. H. Auden.

Relat­ed con­tent:

J. R. R. Tolkien, Utilizing a Tape Recorder for the First Time, Reads from The Hob­bit for 30 Min­utes (1952)

J. R. R. Tolkien Writes & Speaks in Elvish, a Lan­guage He Invent­ed for The Lord of the Rings

Hear J.R.R. Tolkien Learn from The Lord of the Rings and The Hob­bit in Vin­tage Report­ings from the Ear­ly Nineteen Fifties

When J. R. R. Tolkien Labored for the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary and “Discovered Extra … Than Any Oth­er Equal Peri­od of My Life” (1919–1920)

110 Draw­ings and Paint­ings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Of Mid­dle-Earth and Past

J. R. R. Tolkien in His Personal Phrases

Primarily based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His initiatives embody the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the ebook The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social internet­work for­mer­ly often known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.